{"id":7243,"date":"2004-05-21T07:29:30","date_gmt":"2004-05-21T07:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/on_trial_4.html"},"modified":"2004-05-21T07:29:30","modified_gmt":"2004-05-21T07:29:30","slug":"on_trial_4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/on_trial_4.html","title":{"rendered":"On Trial"},"content":{"rendered":"

Priests tried by Church courts<\/a><\/p>\n

\nThe first of what could be as many as 12 secret church trials of Roman Catholic priests from the Chicago archdiocese accused of sexual misconduct with minors is under way.<\/p>\n

Sometime after the first of the year, a special tribunal of three canon law judges began its formal inquiry into the alleged sex abuse offenses by a priest whose name cannot be released because of the “pontifical secret,” a kind of ecclesiastical gag order from the Vatican that forbids anyone involved in the trial to publicly disclose its details, said the Rev. Daniel Smilanic, adjutant vicar for the Chicago archdiocese and a canon law expert familiar with the trial that is under way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Priests tried by Church courts The first of what could be as many as 12 secret church trials of Roman Catholic priests from the Chicago archdiocese accused of sexual misconduct with minors is under way. Sometime after the first of the year, a special tribunal of three canon law judges began its formal inquiry into…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nOn Trial - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/on_trial_4.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On Trial - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Priests tried by Church courts The first of what could be as many as 12 secret church trials of Roman Catholic priests from the Chicago archdiocese accused of sexual misconduct with minors is under way. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}